TALLADEGA, Ala.
Montreal, au revoir?
How in the world did NASCAR just lose Montreal?
And why?
Here it is: http://bit.ly/SKaKet
There it goes....
Negotiations gone awry?
Negotiations just botched?
Strong-arm tactics rebuffed?
Power play in progress?
Blind-side hit? Looks that way for this sport.
Maybe it's time for a few penalty shots in this deal.
First off, NASCAR appears a step behind at the moment on several fronts. It's mid-October and the Nationwide and Truck tour schedules have yet to be released, and the 2013 Sprint Cup calendar just came out.
Why so slow? What's really going on behind the curtains?

Montreal by night, with NASCAR haulers leaving Gilles Villeneueve after the race for the trek back to North Carolina (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)

Did Montreal just not work for this sport?
Formula One seems to make it work just fine.
And for the past six summers NASCAR's Nationwide series has played to a nice crowd of 60,000 at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, on the scenic Ile de Notre Dame, in the heart of the oh so picturesque and sophisticated French-Canadian city.
Remembering that day a few years back that Ray Evernham flew us up to Montreal to watch George Gillett's Canadiens, playing in the Centre Bell, one of the world's busiest arenas, classy and with such high-tech wizardry...
Remembering how Robby Gordon opened NASCAR's run in town with that wild display of emotion back in 2007....

How can this sport afford to just throw away a market of four million people?
An international market at that. Really the only international market this sport has at the moment.
Is NASCAR really abandoning Montreal to Bernie Ecclestone and the F1 brigade?
Why in the world did NASCAR's negotiations here drag on so long anyway?

Hey, maybe this sport just doesn't need Montreal and its four million. NASCAR already plays in-or-around 13 of the 14 largest metropolitan areas in the United States. Maybe Montreal, though it is the 15th largest city in North America, is simply superfluous.
Then again, maybe Jacques Villeneuve simply didn't pan out for NASCAR as a drawing card.
And after all, Toronto, with six million people, is a larger market than Montreal.

Ron Fellows: the legendary Canadian driver, winner at Montreal, now owner of Toronto's Mosport (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)

NASCAR officials say they hope to be back in Canada eventually with a big league event.
Thinking Mosport:
http://bit.ly/OcYCq7
At the moment the most likely scenario for this sport would be a deal with Ron Fellows, the NASCAR-loyal driver, a world-class road racer who runs most all the NASCAR road courses, Cup and Nationwide...and who last year bought the Mosport track -- an hour northeast of Toronto -- with partner billionaire developer Carlos Fidani.
That might work well for this sport. Great town and all. But it doesn't look like a 2013 deal, though there is some talk about a NASCAR Truck race at Mosport.
A Truck race on a road course? In fact there is talk about Trucks running as companion events with the Grand-Am series -- as zany as that sounds. It's enough to make someone wonder just who is in charge of things these days.

A sunny NASCAR summer afternoon in Montreal, with the city skyline prominent (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)

This sport's marketing is sometimes suspect, and maybe Montreal is one of those cases.
The NASCAR line, for drivers, car owners and track promoters, and sometimes sponsors too, is pretty blunt and basic: we've got the show, and we'll let you play the game.
Maybe Francois Dumontier, the Montreal promoter, simply didn't play the game right. Maybe he tried to strong-arm NASCAR into giving him a Cup date. Remember how well that 'Cup date' debate played out for Bruton Smith and Texas back in the day?
The city of Montreal owns the Isle and the track, and Dumontier has the lease, for the two race weekends each year the city allows.
Dumontier has other problems too at the moment; one of his subsidiaries just filed for bankruptcy, with $5 million or so in unpaid bills, one reason Indy-car isn't going back to Edmonton.
And Dumontier seems to be saying he never really made any money on the Nationwide races in Montreal.
But then part of NASCAR's responsibility to its race teams and sponsors is to provide the promotion and marketing and television packages that help them go out and sell sponsorships. And lately that part of the deal should be called into question -- tour sponsors appear to either be leaving -- Dodge, Office Depot, Diageo,Red Bull, Aflac, US Army, UPS -- or just shuffling over to another team, recycled.
Losing Montreal won't help things.

Montreal promoter Francois Dumontier: a bluff called? But NASCAR loses a major market. A big league poker game gone awry? (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)

But then maybe this Montreal fiasco is a good launching point for a larger debate about the Sprint Cup and Nationwide and Truck tours, and maybe too the soon-to-be merged sports car world of NASCAR Grand-Am and ALMS.
Star crew chief Greg Zipadelli, who runs Tony Stewart's team, took one look Friday afternoon at a copy of the new 2013 Sprint Cup schedule and, partly in jest, tore it in half: "Now this is what we ought to do with it -- which half do you want to run?"
Zipadelli laughed, waving half in one hand and the other half in the other.
The point was clear: the Cup schedule is just too darned long, with too many races, 38 weeks of Cup racing, from Valentine's Day till Thanksgiving.
Want a break?
Let's see, think we've got Easter open. And maybe a weekend in late July.
One issue: how to keep all 23 Cup tour track promoters happy and busy.

NASCAR can't get much closer to the heart of a city of four million people than this (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)

Uh, but maybe we should be looking at the stands and counting fans, and checking TV ratings, and see if NASCAR Sprint Cup racing is simply oversaturating the country.
Just about everyone at this point of the season is simply flat worn out. And yet we've still got Sunday's typically nerve-wracking 500 here, and then Charlotte next Saturday night, and then Kansas City, and Martinsville, Va., and Fort Worth, Tex., and Phoenix, and finally Homestead-Miami.
Oh, by the way, can you guys squeeze in some Tuesday-Wednesday testing the next month or so too? And be sure to have those new 2013 chassis under that new 2013 sheet metal.....
Goodyear tire engineers and tire builders will be working overtime through Christmas, it looks like, to start stockpiling tires for next season....which remember kicks off Jan. 10th with three or four days of Daytona testing for the Feb. 16th Daytona 500.

Here's the 2013 calendar. What would you change? What glaring mistakes do you see?

In my mind, Fontana, California has long outlived it's usefulness on the schedule. We either need to go back to Rockingham, or make some MAJOR banking increases in Fontana..... or Just bulldoze the place and turn it into a huge parking lot, so we can park Brian France's ego there!

Who knows anymore with this gang. Good point with the question about the fans in the stands. When\\\'s the last time you saw full house at Nascar races? It\\\'s been so long I\\\'ve forgotten when it was. 2007?

Change? How about one visit per track, with two exceptions: Daytona and Charlotte. And even with that, I would be amendable to eliminating the fall Charlotte race. The benefits far outweigh the status quo, and the suddenly large number of open dates throughout the calendar would allow a new market (or bring back Rockingham, for instance) if needed.

If Daytona and Charlotte deserve two dates a year, so do the other tracks that presently have two dates. There are NO benefits from eliminating dates from tracks that can support two dates.

Get off the Rockingham myth. Rockingham is useless for major league racing.

The only changes needed to the schedule are -

Put start times to 12:15 PM.
Put race distances at 400-mile tracks back to 500 miles.
Switch the Diehard 500 at Talladega and the Old Dominion 500 at Martinsville around - Martinsville Oct. 20 and Talladega October 27.

Reply to comment

Your name:
*

E-mail: *

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.

I live in Fontana's backyard and attended many races over the past 8 years or so, but for this year and going forward, the wife & I aren't bothering. We will probably take the Friday before the race off and head to the track to check out practice, but as far as going to a race there, no way. Too boring. Same for Vegas too.

It really is too bad about Fontana - it is a very nice facility that unfortunately hosts very boring stock car races.

Your caption under the Montreal photo ironically misses the point of what is wrong with the Montreal race. The fact that the race \"can\'t get much closer to the heart of a city of four million people than this\" is the main reason that my husband and I, who live in Canada, have never attended the Montreal race. Because the race is near the heart of the city there is no camping and no parking at the track which would mean we would need to stay at a hotel and take public transit. Sorry, but for us camping at the track is part of the NASCAR experience. We go to 3 races per year in the USA and have found that the tracks with the biggest traffic headaches are located in urban areas.

We are thrilled with the possibility of a NASCAR race, of any kind, at Ron Fellows MOSPORT track. It is less than 2 hours from where we live, but more importantly it is more than an hour away from Toronto, in a rural area, so big city traffic problems are not an issue. The fact that the first NASCAR race might be a truck race does not concern us. In case anybody hasn\'t noticed, the NASCAR truck series is often more exciting these days than cup racing.

In the long run I think that moving the Canadian race to MOSPORT will be a better move for Canadian NASCAR fans.